ArtsBeat |
National Book Awards Go to ‘Salvage the Bones’ and ‘Swerve’

Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

National Book Awards Go to ‘Salvage the Bones’ and ‘Swerve’

By Julie Bosman November 16, 2011 5:02 pmNovember 16, 2011 5:02 pm

11:08 p.m. | UpdatedJesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for fiction on Wednesday night for “Salvage the Bones,” a haunting tale of the struggles of a 15-year-old pregnant girl as a hurricane bears down on her fictional Gulf Coast town of Bois Sauvage, Miss.

Tina Fineberg/Associated PressThe poet John Ashbery was honored for his lifetime of work.

Accepting the award with a trembling voice, Ms. Ward said she had begun writing stories to honor her younger brother after his death, to do something with her life that would have meaning.

“I understood that I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor, and the black and the rural people of the South,” Ms. Ward said, “so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important, as theirs.”

“Salvage the Bones” was published by Bloomsbury USA, a division of Bloomsbury Publishing. Ms. Ward, a former writer in residence at the University of Mississippi, has also written the novel “Where the Line Bleeds.”

In the nonfiction category, Stephen Greenblatt won for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” a “rumination on the pleasure of knowledge and on the agony of its loss,” the judges’ citation said. It was published by W.W. Norton & Company.

“My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you,” Mr. Greenblatt said in his acceptance speech. “My book is about what the magic of the written word is.”

The awards, celebrating their 62nd year, were attended by 650 guests who packed a ballroom at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan, a cavernous space only four blocks from Zuccotti Park, a proximity that was dryly noted early in the evening.

“I thought I should point out, since no one else has, that we are occupying Wall Street,” said the poet Ann Lauterbach, who introduced one of the honorees.

This year’s awards left many people in the publishing industry repeating a frequent complaint over the obscurity of many of the finalists. The much-scrutinized list of fiction finalists was missing “The Art of Fielding,” the lavishly praised debut novel by Chad Harbach, and “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides, among others.

The actor John Lithgow, author of a memoir titled“Drama,” was the evening’s host, lightly mocking his presence among the literati.

To be eligible for an award, a book must have been written by a United States citizen. Winners received $10,000 and a bronze statue.

The award for poetry went to Nikky Finney for her fourth collection, “Head Off & Split,” published by TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. In its citation, the judging panel said Ms. Finney “finds poetic joy and a political imagination in family wisdom, workaday living and erotic syllables that sing the body of women.”

The prize for young people’s literature went to Thanhha Lai for “Inside Out and Back Again,” the story of a wartime escape from South Vietnam. It was published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, which has independent stores in South Florida,Westhampton Beach, N.Y., and the Cayman Islands, won the 2011 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Mr. Kaplan, who is also the gregarious co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International, has been hailed as one of the most innovative independent booksellers in the country.

In his remarks, Mr. Kaplan recalled when he opened his first bookstore in then-gritty Miami in 1983, during what he remembered as “a golden age of bookselling.”

“We need to reassert the role of the booksellers,” he said. “We need to recognize and honor the place of the bookseller in the publishing process.”

Mr. Kaplan added: “I firmly believe that even with all the upheaval that we find in our industry today, there’s room for plenty of optimism. Writers are writing marvelous and interesting books. Publishers are publishing them.”

The award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters went to the poet John Ashbery, a native of Rochester, N.Y., who has published more than 20 books of poetry and has won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Mr. Ashbery, 84, walking gingerly, stepped onstage to a long standing ovation and spoke of the joys of writing poetry, which “gives me a pleasure I can almost taste.”

“It is fun, though it isn’t supposed to be,” he said. “But somehow the difficulty is embedded in the pleasure.”